The
word serendipity itself was coined by
the English author and historian Horace Walpole, in a
letter written to his friend (and distant cousin) Horace Mann on 28 January
1754. Mann had recently sent Walpole a much-prized portrait of Bianca Cappello,
a sixteenth century Italian noblewomen who had married into the Medici dynasty,
and while waiting for the picture to arrive Walpole had stumbled across the Cappello coat of arms in an old book. “This
discovery, indeed,” he wrote, “is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity.”

But
Walpole hadn’t just made the word up from thin air. Instead, he had taken it from “a silly fairy tale”
he had read called The Three Princes of
Serendip, whose title characters, he explained, “were always making discoveries, by
accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.”

But neither had the fourteenth century writers of Walpole’s “silly
fairy tale” invented the name Serendip. In fact, it’s an old name for Sri Lanka, and probably comes from some ancient Sanskrit word meaning “dwelling-place of lions” (although there are several rival explanations).

For
that, we turn to the English writer William Boyd, who coined the fantastic antonym zemblanityin his 2001 novel Armadillo. Describing the practice of “making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries,” Boyd took the word zemblanityfrom the name of
Novaya Zemlya, a bleak and barren Arctic archipelago in the far north of Russia that was
once used as a Soviet nuclear testing site—in other words, about as far removed from a
tropical island as it’s possible to be.